Slashdot Mirror
Looking To Spammers To Solve Hard AI Problems
An anonymous reader writes "With bots getting closer to beating text-based CAPTCHAs for good, New Scientist points out that when they do, OCR technology will at least have advanced. The article goes on to suggest that whatever kind of reverse Turing Test that comes next should be chosen to motivate spammers to solve other pressing AI problems, such as image recognition. Are there any other problems that criminal crowdsourcing could help with?"
Spammers sell their code to other spammers all the time.
Facial recognition is not only pretty good, but is available in consumer applications. Google's Picasa does it quite well for your personal photos, and Face.com can go through your Facebook photos and quite accurately suggest tags.
CAPTCHAs have been dead for a long time already. Please direct me to the spam software that can actually read and interpret these for me, because I have about an 80% failure rate. I'm human, the very thing that is supposed to be able to figure all this out. If I see a site asking me to type in some obscure word or number, I click elsewhere. It's just too much trouble.
Spammers aren't using software to solve this problem anyway! Bold statement you might say? Maybe. Travel your backside to Asia, or, from the comfort of your own chair you could visit sites like sulit.com.ph (think craigs list wanna-be, it's that kind of thing) Every 3rd advert is asking for 'writers' that can log in to forums and post at least 3 or more messages before getting banned. How much does the lucky employee earn? About $200 USD and up per month. It's real money. So who is paying for this? People like the PHB in 1st world corporate wasteland, maybe your CEO thinking it's a good way to get more hits, maybe you. (No, not you personally) Evidently it works or the money wouldn't be flowing, and you wouldn't have 3000 people advertising this service each and every day.
You only have to get the word that OCR can recognize right. Just try guessing which of the two words OCR can't recognize and type some random gibberish instead of that word, it will let you through.
Actually this exists: http://spamornot.org/